During the 1950s and 60s the photographer Harold Chapman, who has died aged 95, chronicled the denizens of the “Beat hotel” in Paris. After a chance encounter with the photographer John Deakin in Soho, London, in the mid-50s, where he had been documenting jazz, Chapman moved to Paris in 1956 and lived at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur, the hotel in the city’s Latin quarter that became known as a favourite destination for Beat writers including William S Burroughs and Gregory Corso.
As well as Burroughs, his neighbours included the American writer Harold Norse, and the poet and painter Kay “Kaja” Johnson. During his sojourn at the Left Bank hotel – he was the last guest to leave when the establishment closed its doors in 1963 – Chapman documented street life in Paris, including the food markets of Les Halles, photographs of which were published in the book Vanishing France (1975, with John L Hess).
